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A spokesman for Ross said: ‘He didn’t take part at all and he didn’t do an interview. It was never agreed and it was never going to be broadcast. There’s not a release form signed for this, or a contract or whatever, so it was never going to be anything made for broadcast. It was informal. A personal situation.’

The conversation was recorded in September, around the same time that Oliver was interviewed by Ross for his Friday night chat show on BBC1.

The two are thought to know each other socially.

Like Ross, Oliver has often been criticised for his free use of expletives on television. A recent edition of Jamie’s Ministry Of Food, the Channel 4 series following attempts by Oliver to encourage the people of Rotherham to cook healthy food, featured the F-word 23 times.

Tory MP Philip Davies, who sits on the Commons Culture Committee, said: ‘Either what Jonathan Ross said during the making of this programme was appropriate or it wasn’t.

‘If it was appropriate in September, why are his representatives trying to suppress it now? If it wasn’t appropriate in September, why has it taken them so long to do something about it?’

Ross is due to return to presenting his Saturday morning Radio 2 show on January 24 after being suspended by the BBC Trust for 12 weeks. When the suspension was announced in October, BBC director-general Mark Thompson said that Ross was on his ‘final warning’.

In its report on the so-called Sachsgate row published last month, the BBC Trust said the calls made to the veteran Fawlty Towers star were ‘grossly offensive’ and there was no ‘editorial justification’ for broadcasting them.

The Trust added that the material broadcast on Brand’s Radio 2 show on Saturday October 18 was a ‘deplorable intrusion’ into the private lives of Sachs and Georgina Baillie, his 23-year-old granddaughter.